A French settler and her daughter at La Salle’s fort (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
PIONEER SETTLERS
Many people consider María de Agreda, the famous Lady in Blue, to be the first important European woman in Texas history. But even if her spirit came to America, she herself never set foot in the future Lone Star State. Hundreds of women did come to the Texas frontier from the late 1500s to 1821. Who were these pioneers? Why did they come to a distant and dangerous frontier? Was it by accident or on purpose? And what happened to them once they were on Texas soil? Studying the lives of these female settlers who helped shape Texas history in the Spanish colonial period can both teach and inspire us.
The first European women in Texas suffered great hardships, and many of them died young. Some were Spanish; others were French. Their nations across the Atlantic Ocean were both trying to claim areas in America that included Texas.
In 1554 four ships with about three hundred people on board left the port of Veracruz in Mexico. They were headed for Spain with no plans to visit Texas. On their way to Havana, Cuba, the ships were soon caught in a bad storm. Foul weather blew the vessels off course and back toward land. Three of the four ships, the Santa María de Yciar, San Esteban, and Espíritu Santo, were wrecked on the Texas coast near the southern end of Padre Island.
As many as two hundred people may have survived the shipwrecks. About thirty of them managed to get a small boat from one of the ships and sail down the coast toward Mexico, where they hoped to get aid. Their efforts took too long, however, and Spanish officials were too slow in responding to the crisis.
This meant that the other castaways, including women and small children, were left to their fate. Hoping to reach Mexico, they began walking south along the beach toward the port of Santiesteban del Puerto (modern Tampico). Indians along this part of the Texas coast were really hostile toward Europeans. They were members of the same hunting and gathering groups who had killed many of Cabeza de Vaca’s companions, some thirty years earlier. These Native Americans began following the shipwrecked Spaniards, killing everyone who fell behind the others. The Indians dared not attack the larger party of Spaniards, because the men were armed with deadly crossbows.
When the Spaniards reached the mouth of the Río Grande, they found it necessary to build crude rafts from driftwood. The Great River was simply too deep and wide to wade. In crossing it, a large bundle was thrown overboard to lighten the load on a raft. Unfortunately, it held all of the crossbows, the only long-range weapons.
Losing the crossbows meant that the Europeans were now all at the mercy of the Indians. The natives mounted attack after attack, and all but two of the shipwrecked Spaniards were killed as they traveled south of the Río Grande.
One of the survivors was named Marcos de Mena. He had been left for dead among others killed by the Indians. Fortunately, he recovered from his wounds and walked to Pánuco, a province to the north of Veracruz. Thanks to Mena, we know about the awful fate of these first Spanish women in Texas, even though we do not know their names.
The next European women in the future Lone Star State were French. Although they came to Texas more than 130 years after the disaster described above, these French women did not fare much better than the Spanish females who found themselves shipwrecked on Padre Island.
In 1685 René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, arrived at Matagorda Bay to set up a French colony on the Gulf Coast. This outpost became known as La Salle’s colony. The French explorer and colonizer brought perhaps two hundred men, women, and children with him. But their numbers quickly got smaller and smaller. Some deserted the colony right away. Others died from disease, snakebite, drowning, or Karankawa arrows. La Salle himself was shot to death by his own men in March 1687. Then Karankawa Indians destroyed the French settlement in a brutal attack at Christmastime in 1688.
Who were the French women at the doomed fort and what happened to them? We have several ways to find answers to these questions. One of the colonists was named Henri Joutel. He kept a journal (diary) and wrote about what was happening to the French colony. Also, the few people who survived at La Salle’s colony later told about what had happened to the others.
Another source of information did not come about until the 1990s, when one of La Salle’s ships was found in Matagorda Bay. La Belle had been shipwrecked soon after the French arrived on the Texas coast. Although it had sunk more than three hundred years before, La Belle’s cargo was in very good condition. Thousands of the items on board have been recovered and studied by scholars at Texas A&M University.
The artifacts (objects) taken from the wrecked La Belle shed light on the French colony. They include wooden combs, shoes, rings, and mirrors that were possibly intended for use by the women colonists. Recovered items also include beautifully preserved cannons, as well as thousands of small glass beads and other trinkets intended as gifts for the Indians.
One of the women at this French colony was Isabelle Planteau Talon, who was from Paris. Earlier, perhaps in 1671 while she was living in Quebec, Canada, Isabelle Planteau had married Lucien Talon from Normandy, a province in France. The couple had three sons and two daughters. They and their children had moved back to France by the time La Salle organized his Gulf voyage of 1684.
The Talons joined La Salle’s expedition, and at that time Madame Talon was again pregnant. During the voyage, she gave birth to a fourth son, Robert. In all, there were six Talon children. They ranged in age from a few months to twelve years by the time the family arrived in the Texas wilderness.
Things did not go well for the Talons. Henri Joutel wrote that the father became “lost in the woods” on one of La Salle’s overland expeditions. We do not know what happened to Lucien, the father. His poor widow suffered yet another loss when her elder daughter, Marie-Elizabeth, also died.
To make matters worse, Isabelle Talon became involved in a quarrel with another family at the fort. This involved the question of who was the first child born at La Salle’s colony. It was an important matter, because the French crown gave special gifts and rewards to the first child born in a new overseas colony. Even though Robert was born on the voyage to Texas, Madame Talon thought her son qualified as the first child. Gabriel Minime, Sieur Barbier, disagreed.
Joutel wrote in his diary that Sieur Barbier, “used to slip aside from the company with a young maid he had a kindness for.” The woman became pregnant as a result of these secret meetings, and Barbier then agreed to marry her. Barbier insisted that his child be recognized as the first to be born at the colonial outpost. As it turned out, the dispute did not matter, because it had a sad ending. Barbier’s wife had a miscarriage, and her first baby died.
When La Salle left his colony to look for the Mississippi River, he ordered Isabelle Talon to give up ten-year-old Pierre. The child must go with the expedition to the land of the Hasinai Indians. Young Pierre would be left there to learn the language of the Indians. Both mother and son were tearful when they parted. They probably suspected that they would never see each other again.
Pierre’s eleventh birthday fell on March 21, 1687, the day after La Salle was shot by his own men. The young French boy was left with Hasinai Indians in East Texas, not because La Salle had ordered it, but because the adults deserted him. He spent three years with these natives before being freed by Alonso de León in 1690.
While Pierre was with the Hasinais, things went badly for the French colony. Sieur Barbier had been left in command of the colonists, which included his wife and seven “maids” (young unmarried women). Without La Salle’s leadership, the settlers were a sad “band of… misfits, women and children who clung to a meager existence.” But the worst was yet to come. From other Indians, Karankawas had learned of La Salle’s death, and they decided to attack the weakened colony.
The end came in late December 1688. Karankawas quickly killed two Franciscan priests and Commander Barbier. Karankawa women tried to protect the life of Madame Barbier, who had a three-month-old baby at her breast. Warriors killed her, grabbed the crying baby by its heels, and bashed its head against the trunk of a tree. So ended the life of the first European child born on Texas soil. Luckily, Karankawa women were able to protect the Talon children and would not let warriors kill them. They also saved Eustache Bréman, an orphan child who had been living with the Talons.
A French settler and her daughter at La Salle’s fort (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
The four remaining Talon children had already suffered great losses. Their father and older sister had died, and they were separated from Pierre. Now they saw their mother clubbed to death by a Karankawa warrior.
When Alonso de León arrived at the site of the destroyed French fort in April 1689, he found three bodies. One was a woman with an arrow in her back. A soldier with don Alonso became so emotional at the sad sight that he wrote a poem to the dead woman. It spoke of a “beautiful French maiden fair” who was “now so cold, so dead.”
By early 1689, only one European female remained in all of Texas. Because of her youth, Marie-Madeleine Talon had not been killed by the Karankawas. The only girl among the four Talon children saved by the Karankawas, she was kept as their prisoner for eighteen months, until Alonso de León came to her rescue.
Can you imagine what it must have been like for her and the other children during those months? They had no idea how long it might be before help would come or if they would ever be set free. All they had known was life among other Europeans. Now they lived among strange people who spoke a language they did not understand.
When the Spaniards rescued Marie-Madeleine, she was sixteen, covered with tattoos in the manner of Texas Indians, and still a virgin. The Karankawa men were apparently attracted to the “quite pretty” French maiden. Luckily for her, young Eustache Bréman’s quick wit kept them from molesting her. He warned the warriors that the “girl’s god would make them all die” if they dared to harm her.
After being freed by Alonso de León, Marie-Madeleine and her brothers, who had also been tattooed by Texas natives, were taken to Mexico City. There they lived in the viceroy’s palace with the Conde de Galve and his family. The viceroy treated them kindly, regarded them as household servants, and considered them as adopted Spanish citizens.
When the viceroy and his wife, doña Elvira, returned to Europe in 1697, they took the twenty-two-year-old French woman with them. Marie-Madeleine Talon married Pierre Simon of Paris and had a son in 1699. Her horrible experiences in America were finally behind her.
After Marie-Madeleine left for a new life in Mexico City, there were no European women in Texas. And when Mission San Francisco de los Tejas was abandoned in 1693, no Spaniards—male or female—lived in Texas for more than twenty years.
During that twenty years, Franciscan missionary activity in northern New Spain led to the founding of Mission San Juan Bautista, on January 1, 1700. Located south of the Río Grande at modern-day Guerrero, Coahuila, the mission became the gateway to Texas, because one Spanish expedition after another passed through it. At the nearby presidio, also called San Juan Bautista, one family became very powerful. They were the Ramóns.
When Louis St. Denis arrived at San Juan Bautista in July 1714, he was seeking Father Francisco Hidalgo, whom we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. St. Denis also found Commandant Diego Ramon’s stepgranddaughter, Manuela Sánchez, living at the presidio. As mentioned earlier, the Frenchman and the Spanish maiden were quickly attracted to each other, and they soon became engaged. St. Denis also had practical reasons for wanting to marry her. The young señorita had family ties to powerful people in New Spain. These relatives could help the Frenchman be accepted in the Spanish empire and succeed in business.
After their marriage in late 1715 or early 1716, Luis (as the Spanish called him) and Manuela were soon separated. The Frenchman left his bride in late April 1716 to serve as an officer in the Diego Ramón expedition to East Texas. Manuela had just celebrated her nineteenth birthday, and she was pregnant by then. Her complete name after marriage was a long one—Manuela Sánchez Navarro y Gomes Mascorro de St. Denis!
The Ramón-St. Denis expedition of 1716 was the first step in Spain’s colonial occupation of Texas. That presence lasted for more than one hundred years. Unlike the earlier Spanish expeditions of the 1680s and 1690s, Ramón and St. Denis brought female colonists to the future Lone Star State.
The first recorded Spanish women in Texas were María Longoria, Antonia de la Cerda, Antonia Vidales, Ana María Ximénez de Valdez, María Antonia de Ximénez, Juana de San Miguel, and Josefa Sánchez. Aside from these women, who were all married, Ana Guerra was single and entered Texas as its first señorita.
After the Spaniards came back to East Texas in 1716, Louis St. Denis became unpopular with officials in New Spain. They feared that the Frenchman wanted to engage in illegal trade between French Louisiana and Spanish New Spain. There were also strained relations between France and Spain at this time.
St. Denis, while trying to defend himself before Spanish officials, was put in a Mexico City prison for more than a year. When the Frenchman finally gained his freedom, he was told that he could never return to Texas.
Fearing he might be placed in prison again, Louis fled toward Louisiana. Later, Spanish officials allowed Manuela to join her husband at Natchitoches. In the meantime, she had given birth to their second child. The couple’s happy reunion came sometime between 1719 and 1721.
Louis and Manuela had seven children—two sons and five daughters. When her husband died in June 1744, Manuela was left a widow at age forty-seven. At that time, she had to support three or four young children. She continued to live at Natchitoches, Louisiana, until her death on April 16, 1758.
Manuela Sánchez never actually lived in Texas. But she—like María de Agreda—is an important woman in Texas history. Her marriage to Louis St. Denis helped to influence events in northern New Spain and French Louisiana in the 1700s.
As for the eight women who came to Texas with the Diego Ramón expedition in 1716, they are Texas’s first Hispanic (Spanish) female colonists. As noted, seven of these pioneers came as the wives of soldiers, and Ana Guerra soon married one in Texas.
Still, because Texas had only a small number of Spanish settlers, officials in Mexico City worried that the French would try to gain control of Texas. To prevent this, Spain decided to build more presidios and place more missions in the province. But the viceroy and his advisers knew that soldiers and priests alone were not enough to keep Texas out of the hands of Spain’s enemies. More Spanish settlers were needed. To encourage their moving to the frontier, promises of land and financial support might be necessary.
A wise official, Juan Manuel de Olivan Rebolledo, also pointed out that soldiers at the presidios should have the necessary skills for farming. Hopefully, they would stay in Texas after their military service was over. The soldiers should also be married. Don Juan Manuel believed that having wives would cause them “to take root more firmly” in Texas. They would “fill their presidios with the children that their wives bear them.”
As it turned out, important events were happening in Texas that would help bring in more settlers. In 1718 Martín de Alarcón headed a major expedition. Its purpose was to set up Mission San Antonio de Valero and Presidio San Antonio de Béxar. These were to serve as a way station between the Río Grande and the eastern missions. Priests at San Antonio were also to begin converting Native Americans of that region to Christianity. It is well to remember that Alarcon’s expedition contained civilian families. From the very beginning, Villa de Béxar had farmers, muleteers, artisans, and aides to the missionaries.
In all, the Alarcón expedition had a total of seventy-two persons, including thirty-four soldiers. Seven of these soldiers were married and brought along their families. Probably not all of the seven families remained at Villa de Béxar, because Alarcón went on to the six missions in East Texas. But any families in East Texas would have come back to San Antonio after the Chicken War of 1719, which we discussed in Chapter 8.
By 1726 there were forty-four families at the Béxar presidio. Only four households did not include soldiers. This group grew over the next five years to about twenty to twenty-five households. The growth in civilian settlers was partly due to better relations with the Indians, which made San Antonio much safer for frontier families.
Some of the soldiers’ daughters also became old enough to get married. For example, in the early 1720s two children of Cristóbal Carabajal and Juana Guerra married soldiers. Overall, eight daughters of the first Bexareños (original settlers at San Antonio) wed and remained in Texas. By 1730, about forty married couples lived in San Antonio. Other important changes were about to occur.
In 1731 fifty-five settlers arrived at San Antonio from the Canary Islands, near Africa. This was the result of a plan proposed years earlier. An official in Spain thought it would be a good idea to find people in the Canary Islands who would move to Texas. But it was hard to find families willing to come to a rough and distant frontier province. The project also proved expensive, and there were lots of official rules and red tape (routine matters) that slowed things down.
Above all, the Spanish crown was trying to save money in America. Pedro de Rivera’s expedition, which we discussed in Chapter 8, had presented some ideas for cutting back expenses in Texas. This meant closing three of the six missions in East Texas and moving the people to San Antonio. As it turned out, the Canary Islanders arrived at Béxar at the same time as the East Texans.
The older settlers at San Antonio were not happy about the arrival of the newcomers from East Texas and the Canary Islands. The new colonists needed land and water for their crops. On the other hand, the original Bexareños liked things the way they were. They did not like changes, and they did not welcome outsiders.
So it proved difficult for the more recent arrivals to fit in at Béxar. To make matters worse, Apaches in the 1730s began new attacks on the town. But without doubt, the biggest problem was finding ways to accommodate the Canary Islanders at San Antonio.
The fifty-five Isleños (Canary Islanders) were members of fifteen different families. Because not everyone had survived the long trip from the Canary Islands to San Antonio, widows headed two of the families. These women were María Rodríguez Robayna and Mariana Delgado Meleano.
Doña María was said to have a “good figure … long face, fair complexion, black hair and eyebrows.” Although she was only twenty-seven years old, the young woman had six children. They ranged in age from one month to thirteen years. The other family head, Mariana Delgado, traveled with two children, ages two and sixteen. These widows remind us that Isleño women were not just wives and mothers. They also headed two of the fifteen pioneer families that are important in the early history of Béxar.
By the 1730s, San Antonio was a raw frontier town with many different kinds of people. For them to form one successful community was not easy. The manner in which this happened has been studied by historian Jesús de la Teja. As you will note, women played an important part in that process.
Pioneer women contributed a lot at Béxar and elsewhere in Texas. Most came as wives and daughters, and little is known about them except for their names that appear in church or census records. Because none of them could write, these Bexareñas apparently left no letters or diaries.
It is possible, however, to learn something about these women by studying legal records, such as wills and lawsuits. In the next chapter, you will meet some of these “faceless” women who lived on the Texas frontier. You will also learn about the laws that affected them and the rights they enjoyed under these same laws.
A Canary Island Women and her Child on their Way to San Antonio (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
Before turning to women and Spanish law, we need to look at the other pioneer women in Texas history. Not all were in San Antonio, although that was the most important area of settlement.
In Chapter 13, you read about Antonio Gil Ibarvo, the founder of Nacogdoches and Father of East Texas. That town grew rapidly after the Spaniards returned to East Texas in the late 1770s. By the end of the century, its population had reached 660.
Census records from 1799 to 1809 provide bits of information about colonial women on the East Texas frontier. Of special interest are the twenty-four women who headed families there in 1799. They ranged in age from thirty-four to eighty-five. These widows were from very different backgrounds. They included Hispanics, castas (women of mixed races), Indians, French, and one “American,”
The two youngest widows were María Benites and Vicenta Medina. Benites was a Hispanic woman born at Los Adaes. She had two small children, ages four and five. Medina was a mulata (Spanish and black ancestry) from Béxar. She had a twelve-year-old son and a thirteen-year-old daughter. The oldest widow, Rita Vergara, was in her eighties. The only person living with her was an eighteen-year-old grandson.
Nacogdoches was certainly more diverse (varied) than San Antonio, where most people were Hispanic. For example, two French women, who could not read or write, lived in Nacogdoches in 1809. They were Marie-Madeleine Prudhomme and Marie Rambin.
Madame Prudhomme and her husband had married only days before moving to East Texas from Louisiana around 1800. The couple had four children, with the husband working as a farmer. Madame Prudhomme did sewing to help earn money for the family.
Marie Rambin, her husband, and five children left Natchitoches, Louisiana, to live in Nacogdoches. In East Texas, Madame Rambin gave birth to four more children, but one died. When her farmer husband also died, the widow found it hard to support her family. She had to use the boys “in the field,” and the girls were kept busy “making candles and weaving.”
The hard times faced by Madame Prudhomme and Madame Rambin were very different from the successes of three Latina ranchers in the late colonial period. In 1779 the top ten cattle owners at Béxar included María Ana Curbelo, who ranked second. Doña María Ana had become the owner of Las Mulas ranch on Cíbolo Creek when her husband died in 1778.
Also included in the list was Leonor Delgado, who was tied for fifth place in the number of cattle owned. Doña Leonor had been the object of gossip in the 1750s, because she had a child without being married. She later wed Juan José Flores de Abrego. As his widow, she owned 150 head of cattle by the late 1700s.
The position of María Ana Curbelo and Leonor Delgado is minor, however, when compared to that of María del Carmen Calvillo. Born at Béxar on July 9, 1756, María del Carmen was the eldest of six children. Her parents were Ygnacio Calvillo and Antonia de Arocha.
In the 1790s doña María’s father owned the famous Rancho de las Cabras (Goat Ranch) in present-day Wilson County. By then María del Carmen had married Juan Gavino de la Trinidad. The couple had two sons and adopted three other children.
In the previous chapter, you read about the rebels in Texas in the early 1800s and Joaquín de Arredondo’s brutal treatment of them. Doña Maria’s husband, don Juan, approved of the rebellion. So he had to flee the ranch to escape Arredondo’s executions. The Gavinos apparently separated at that time. In any event, don Juan never again lived at the Goat Ranch.
Doña Maria’s father was murdered at the ranch in April 1814. At that time, she became owner and manager of Rancho de las Cabras. She apparently did a very good job, because the ranch grew tremendously in the 1830s when Texas was part of Mexico.
This notable woman died on January 15, 1856. She had lived almost one hundred years! María del Carmen Calvillo made sure that the Rancho de las Cabras would remain in the family by passing it on to two of her adopted children.
The stories of these Latina ranchers show that women, when given the chance, competed very favorably with men on the frontier. Often that chance came because of the death of a husband or father. In that case, women were left to take care of the family, its land, and other possessions.
Hundreds of Hispanic and mixed-race women, as well as a few French women, were among the first pioneers in Spanish Texas. They came as wives, widows, and daughters. Or they were born on the northern frontier of New Spain.
Regardless of how they came to be in Texas, women faced many of the same hardships as men. They bore their children and lived on a frontier threatened by Native Americans hostile to Europeans and by European wars that often spilled over into America. These women definitely played an important role in Texas history.
Without these pioneer settlers, Spain could not have had a permanent civilian presence in Texas during the Spanish colonial period. Without them, the Spanish legacy (influence) would not be so strong in the Lone Star State today.
Young Marí a Calvillo helps brand cattle at her famous Goat Ranch (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
Materials used in preparing this chapter are described below. You can find more information about these sources in the Bibliography at the end of the book.
The best book dealing with the shipwrecks of 1554 is The Nautical Archeology of Padre Island: The Spanish Shipwrecks of 1554, by J. Barto Arnold III and Robert S. Weddle. The best accounts of women at La Salle’s colony may be found in The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762, by Robert S. Weddle, and in Three Primary Documents: La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf, translated and edited by Robert S. Weddle, Mary Christine Morkovsky, and Patricia Galloway. For women at San Antonio, see San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier, by Jesús F. de la Teja.
Quotes are from the following sources: Henri Joutel, Joutel’s Journal of La Salle’s Last Voyage; Robert S. Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762; Robert S. Weddle, Wilderness Manhunt: The Spanish Search for La Salle; Robert S. Weddle, Mary Christine Morkovsky, and Patricia Galloway, translators and editors, Three Primary Documents: La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf; J. Villasana Haggard, translator, “Spain’s Indian Policy in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44 (October 1940): 241; Testimonio de las diligencias hechas por el señor factor Don Manuel Angel de Villegas Puente para el despacho y aviso de las familias que … pasan a poblar a la provincia de los Texas, 1730–1734, Center for American History, Austin; photostats from original documents in the possession of Louis Lenz, Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Sworn Statement of Marie Rambin, July 27, 1809, Robert Bruce Blake Research Collection, Center for American History, Austin, Supplement, volume 6.
For the complete text of the poem about the dead woman at the French fort, see Robert S. Weddle, Wilderness Manhunt: The Spanish Search for La Salle, 187–188.